As it is generally known, electronic calendaring tools are widely used in corporate environments to schedule meetings with colleagues. Existing systems are capable of automatically checking the electronic calendars of team members for open time slots, proposing alternative meeting times, scheduling meetings, and notifying/reminding participants of meetings by electronic mail (“e-mail”). A shortcoming of existing systems arises from the fact that the number of meeting invitees can be quite large, making the use of scheduling features difficult.
FIG. 1 shows an example of an event scheduling user interface in an existing electronic calendaring system. The user interface example of FIG. 1 displays information for a meeting with fifteen (15) meeting invitees. As seen in FIG. 1, when there are more invitees than can be simultaneously displayed within a single screen (the set of invitees in FIG. 1 extends beyond the currently visible names), it may be impossible to easily view all the invitee names at once, and the user must scroll up and down when trying to see which invitees can and cannot attend at a chosen time. Even if the event scheduling user interface allows more (or all) invitees' calendars to be shown, it is still very difficult for the user to see patterns regarding common free times, and/or which calendars are busiest. In particular, the event scheduling user interface in such existing systems makes it difficult to quickly identify who cannot attend and who will be hardest to schedule.
For the above reasons and others, it would be desirable to have a new system for providing an event scheduling user interface in an electronic calendar that clusters invitee calendars in various ways to simplify the view, in order to allow the scheduling user to see quickly whether there are scheduling difficulties. In addition, it would be desirable for such a system to operate such that if scheduling difficulties are identified, the user can easily focus on particular problems and deal with them more efficiently, without being distracted by unnecessary details.